The Greek Myths, Volume2

by Robert Graves

  7. The myth of Antiope, Haemon, and the shepherds seems to have been deduced from the same icon as those of Arne (see 43. d) and Alope (see 49. a). We are denied the expected end of the story: that he killed his grandfather Creon with a discus (see 73. p).

  107

  THE EPIGONI

  THE sons of the seven champions who had fallen at Thebes swore to avenge their fathers. They are known as the Epigoni. The Delphic Oracle promised them victory if Alcmaeon, son of Amphiaraus, took command. But he felt no desire to attack Thebes, and hotly disputed the propriety of the campaign with his brother Amphilochus. When they could not agree whether to make war or no, the decision was referred to their mother Eriphyle. Recognizing the situation as a familiar one, Thersander, the son of Polyneices, followed his father’s example: he bribed Eriphyle with the magic robe which Athene had given his ancestress Harmonia at the same time as Aphrodite had given her the magic necklace. Eriphyle decided for war, and Alcmaeon reluctantly assumed command.

  b. In a battle fought before the walls of Thebes, the Epigoni lost Aegialeus, son of Adrastus, and Teiresias the seer then warned the Thebans that their city would be sacked. The walls, he announced, were fated to stand only so long as one of the original seven champions remained alive, and Adrastus, now the sole survivor, would die of grief when he heard of Aegialeus’s death. Consequently, the Thebans’ wisest course was to flee that very night. Teiresias added that whether they took his advice or no made no odds to him; he was destined to die as soon as Thebes fell into Argive hands. Under cover of darkness, therefore, the Thebans escaped northward with their wives, children, weapons, and a few belongings, and when they had travelled far enough, called a halt and founded the city of Hestiaea. At dawn, Teiresias, who went with them, paused to drink at the spring of Tilphussa, and suddenly expired.

  c. That same day, which was the very day on which Adrastus heard of Aegialeus’s death and died of grief, the Argives, finding Thebes evacuated, broke in, razed the walls, and collected the booty. They sent the best of it to Apollo at Delphi, including Teiresias’s daughter Manto, or Daphne, who had stayed behind; and she became his Pythoness.1

  d. Nor was this the end of the matter. Thersander happened to boast in Alcmaeon’s hearing that most of the credit for the Argive victory was due to himself: he had bribed Eriphyle, just as his father Polyneices did before him, to give the order to march. Alcmaeon thus learned for the first time that Eriphyle’s vanity had caused his father’s death, and might well have caused his own. He consulted the Delphic Oracle, and Apollo replied that she deserved death. Alcmaeon mistook this for a dispensation to matricide and, on his return, he duly killed Eriphyle, some say with the aid of his brother Amphilochus. But Eriphyle, as she lay dying, cursed Alcmaeon, and cried out: ‘Lands of Greece and Asia, and of all the world: deny shelter to my murderers!’ The avenging Erinnyes thereupon pursued him and drove him mad.

  e. Alcmaeon fled first to Thesprotia, where he was refused entry, and then to Psophis, where King Phegeus purified him for Apollo’s sake. Phegeus married him to his daughter Arsinoë, to whom Alcmaeon gave the necklace and the robe which he had brought in his baggage. But the Erinnyes, disregarding this purification, continued to plague him, and the land of Psophis grew barren on his account. The Delphic Oracle then advised Alcmaeon to approach the River-god Achelous, by whom he was once more purified; he married Achelous’s daughter Callirrhoë, and settled on land recently formed by the silt of the river, which had not been included in Eriphyle’s ban. There he lived at peace for a while.

  f. A year later, Callirrhoë, fearing that she might lose her beauty, refused Alcmaeon admittance to her couch unless he gave her the celebrated robe and necklace. For love of Callirrhoë, he dared revisit Psophis, where he deceived Phegeus: making no mention of his marriage to Callirrhoë, he invented a prediction of the Delphic Oracle, to the effect that he would never be rid of the Erinnyes until he had dedicated both robe and necklace to Apollo’s shrine. Phegeus thereupon made Arsinoë surrender them, which she was glad to do, believing that Alcmaeon would return to her as soon as the Erinnyes left him; for they were hard on his track again. But one of Alcmaeon’s servants blabbed the truth about Callirrhoë, and Phegeus grew so angry that he ordered his sons to ambush and kill Alcmaeon when he left the palace. Arsinoë witnessed the murder from a window and, unaware of Alcmaeon’s double-dealing, loudly upbraided her father and brothers for having violated guest-right and made her a widow. Phegeus begged her to be silent and listen while he justified himself; but Arsinoë stopped her ears and wished violent death upon him and her brothers before the next new moon. In retaliation, Phegeus locked her in a chest and presented her as a slave to the King of Nemea; at the same time telling his sons: ‘Take this robe and this necklace to Delphic Apollo. He will see to it that they cause no further mischief.’

  g. Phegeus’s sons obeyed him; but, meanwhile, Callirrhoë, informed of what had happened at Psophis, prayed that her infant sons by Alcmaeon might become full-grown men in a day, and avenge his murder. Zeus heard her plea, and they shot up into manhood, took arms, and went to Nemea where, they knew, the sons of Phegeus had broken their return journey from Delphi in the hope of persuading Arsinoë to retract her curse. They tried to tell her the truth about Alcmaeon, but she would not listen to them either; and Callirrhoë’s sons not only surprised and killed them but, hastening towards Psophis, killed Phegeus too, before the next moon appeared in the sky. Since no king or river-god in Greece would consent to purify them of their crimes, they travelled westward to Epirus, and colonized Acarnania, which was named after the elder of the two, Acarnan.

  h. The robe and necklace were shown at Delphi until the Sacred War [fourth century B.C.], when the Phocian bandit Phayllos carried them off, and it is not known whether the amber necklace set in gold which the people of Amathus claim to be Eriphyle’s is genuine or false.2

  i. And some say that Teiresias had two daughters, Daphne and Manto. Daphne remained a virgin and became a Sibyl, but Alcmaeon begot Amphilochus and Tisiphone on Manto before sending her to Apollo at Delphi; he entrusted both children to King Creon of Corinth. Years later, Creon’s wife, jealous of Tisiphone’s extraordinary beauty, sold her as a slave; and Alcmaeon, not knowing who she was, bought her as his serving-girl but fortunately abstained from incest. As for Manto: Apollo sent her to Colophon in Ionia, where she married Rhacius, King of Caria; their son was Mopsus, the famous soothsayer.3

  1. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 66; Pausanias: ix. 5.13 ff., ix. 8.6, and ix. 9. 4 ff.; Hyginus: Fabula 70; Fragments of Aeschylus’s and Sophocles’s Epigoni.

  2. Apollodorus: iii. 7.5–7; Athenaeus: vi. 22; Ovid: Metamorphoses ix. 413 ff.; Pausanias: viii. 24. 8–10 and ix. 41. 2; Parthenius: Narrations 25.

  3. Apollodorus: iii. 7. 7, quoting Euripides’s Alcmaeon; Pausanias: vii. 3.1 and ix. 33.1; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 66.

  1. This is a popular minstrel tale, containing few mythic elements, which could be told either in Thebes or Argos without causing offence; which would be of interest to the people of Psophis, Nemea, and the Achelous valley; which purposed to account for the founding of Hestiaea, and the colonization of Acarnania; and which had a strong moral flavour. It taught the instability of women’s judgement, the folly of men in humouring their vanity or greed, the wisdom of listening to seers who are beyond suspicion, the danger of misinterpreting oracles, and the inescapable curse that fell on any son who killed his mother, even in placation of his murdered father’s ghost (see 114. a).

  2. Eriphyle’s continuous power to decide between war and peace is the most interesting feature of the story. The true meaning of her name, ‘very leafy’, suggests that she was an Argive priestess of Hera in charge of a tree-oracle, like that of Dodona (see 51. 1). If so, this tree is likely to have been a pear, sacred to Hera (see 74. 6). Both the ‘War of the Seven Against Thebes’, which Hesiod calls the ‘War of Oedipus’s Sheep’, and its sequel here recounted, seem to have preceded the Argonautic expedition and the Trojan War,
and may be tentatively referred to the fourteenth century B.C.

  108

  TANTALUS

  THE parentage and origin of Tantalus are disputed. His mother was Pluto, a daughter of Cronus and Rhea or, some say, of Oceanus and Tethys;1 and his father either Zeus, or Tmolus, the oak-chapleted deity of Mount Tmolus who, with his wife Omphale, ruled over the kingdom of Lydia and had judged the contest between Pan and Apollo.2 Some, however, call Tantalus a king of Argos, or of Corinth; and others say that he went northward from Sipylus in Lydia to reign in Paphlagonia; whence, after he had incurred the wrath of the gods, he was expelled by Ilus the Phrygian, whose young brother Ganymedes he had abducted and seduced.3

  b. By his wife Euryanassa, daughter of the River-god Pactolus; or by Eurythemista, daughter of the River-god Xanthus; or by Clytia, daughter of Amphidamantes; or by the Pleiad Dione, Tantalus became the father of Pelops, Niobe, and Broteas.4 Yet some call Pelops a bastard, or the son of Atlas and the nymph Linos.5

  c. Tantalus was the intimate friend of Zeus, who admitted him to Olympian banquets of nectar and ambrosia until, good fortune turning his head, he betrayed Zeus’s secrets and stole the divine food to share among his mortal friends. Before this crime could be discovered, he committed a worse. Having called the Olympians to a banquet on Mount Sipylus, or it may have been at Corinth, Tantalus found that the food in his larder was insufficient for the company and, either to test Zeus’s omniscience, or merely to demonstrate his good will, cut up his son Pelops, and added the pieces to the stew prepared for them, as the sons of Lycaon had done with their brother Nyctimus when they entertained Zeus in Arcadia.6 None of the gods failed to notice what was on their trenchers, or to recoil in horror, except Demeter who, being dazed by her loss of Persephone, ate the flesh from the left shoulder.7

  d. For these two crimes Tantalus was punished with the ruin of his kingdom and, after his death by Zeus’s own hand, with eternal torment in the company of Ixion, Sisyphus, Tityus, the Danaids, and others. Now he hangs, perennially consumed by thirst and hunger, from the bough of a fruit-tree which leans over a marshy lake. Its waves lap against his waist, and sometimes reach his chin, yet whenever he bends down to drink, they slip away, and nothing remains but the black mud at his feet; or, if he ever succeeds in scooping up a handful of water, it slips through his fingers before he can do more than wet his cracked lips, leaving him thirstier than ever. The tree is laden with pears, shining apples, sweet figs, ripe olives and pomegranates, which dangle against his shoulders; but whenever he reaches for the luscious fruit, a gust of wind whirls them out of his reach.8

  e. Moreover, an enormous stone, a crag from Mount Sipylus, overhangs the tree and eternally threatens to crush Tantalus’s skull.9 This is his punishment for a third crime: namely theft, aggravated by perjury. One day, while Zeus was still an infant in Crete, being suckled by the she-goat Amaltheia, Hephaestus had made Rhea a golden mastiff to watch over him; which subsequently became the guardian of his temple at Dicte. But Pandareus son of Merops, a native of Lydian or, it may have been Cretan, Miletus – if, indeed, it was not Ephesus – dared to steal the mastiff, and brought it to Tantalus for safe keeping on Mount Sipylus. After the hue and cry had died down, Pandareus asked Tantalus to return it to him, but Tantalus swore by Zeus that he had neither seen nor heard of a golden dog. This oath coming to Zeus’s ears, Hermes was given orders to investigate the matter; and although Tantalus continued to perjure himself, Hermes recovered the dog by force or by stratagem, and Zeus crushed Tantalus under a crag of Mount Sipylus. The spot is still shown near the Tantalid Lake, a haunt of white swan-eagles. Afterwards, Pandareus and his wife Harmothoë fled to Athens, and thence to Sicily, where they perished miserably.10

  f. According to others, however, it was Tantalus who stole the golden mastiff, and Pandareus to whom he entrusted it and who, on denying that he had ever received it was destroyed, together with his wife, by the angry gods, or turned into stone. But Pandareus’s orphaned daughters Merope and Cleothera, whom some call Cameiro and Clytië were reared by Aphrodite on curds, honey, and sweet wine. Hera endowed them with beauty and more than human wisdom; Artemis made them grow tall and strong; Athene instructed them in every known handicraft. It is difficult to understand why these goddesses showed such solicitude, or chose Aphrodite to soften Zeus’s heart towards these orphans and arrange good marriages for them – unless, of course, they had themselves encouraged Pandareus to commit the theft. Zeus must have suspected something, because while Aphrodite was closeted with him on Olympus, the Harpies snatched away the three girls, with his consent, and handed them over to the Erinnyes, who made them suffer vicariously for their father’s sins.11

  g. This Pandareus was also the father of Aëdon, the wife of Zethus, to whom she bore Itylus. Aëdon was racked with envy of her sister Niobe, who rejoiced in the love of six sons and six daughters and, when trying to murder Sipylus, the eldest of them, she killed Itylus by mistake; whereupon Zeus transformed her into the Nightingale who, in early summer, nightly laments her murdered child.12

  h. After punishing Tantalus, Zeus was pleased to revive Pelops; and therefore ordered Hermes to collect his limbs and boil them again in the same cauldron, on which he laid a spell. The Fate Clotho then rearticulated them; Demeter gave him a solid ivory shoulder in place of the one she had picked clean; and Rhea breathed life into him; while Goat-Pan danced for joy.13

  i. Pelops emerged from the magic cauldron clothed in such radiant beauty that Poseidon fell in love with him on the spot, and carried him off to Olympus in a chariot drawn by golden horses. There he appointed him his cup-bearer and bed-fellow; as Zeus later appointed Ganymedes, and fed him on ambrosia. Pelops first noticed that his left shoulder was of ivory when he bared his breast in mourning for his sister Niobe. All true descendants of Pelops are marked in this way and, after his death, the ivory shoulder-blade was laid up at Pisa.14

  j. Pelops’s mother Euryanassa, meanwhile, made the most diligent search for him, not knowing about his ascension to Olympus; she learned from the scullions that he had been boiled and served to the gods, who seemed to have eaten every last shred of his flesh. This version of the story became current throughout Lydia; many still credit it and deny that the Pelops whom Tantalus boiled in the cauldron was the same Pelops who succeeded him.15

  k. Tantalu’s ugly son Broteas carved the oldest image of the Mother of the Gods, which still stands on the Coddinian Crag, to the north of Mount Sipylus. He was a famous hunter, but refused to honour Artemis, who drove him mad; crying aloud that no flame could burn him, he threw himself upon a lighted pyre and let the flames consume him. But some say that he committed suicide because everyone hated his ugliness. Broteas’s son and heir was named Tantalus, after his grandfather.16

  1. Pausanias: ii. 22. 4; Scholiast on Pindar’s Olympian Odes iii. 41; Hesiod: Theogony 355, with scholiast.

  2. Pausanias: loc. cit.; Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 5; Pliny: Natural History v. 30; Ovid: Metamorphoses ii. 156; Apollodorus: ii. 6. 3.

  3. Hyginus: Fabula 124; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 603; Diodorus Siculus: iv. 74; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 355.

  4. Plutarch: Parallel Stories 33; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 52; Pherecydes, quoted by scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes 11; Hyginus: Fabula 83; Pausanias: 111.22.4.

  5. Lactantius: Stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses vi. 6; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid viii. 130.

  6. Hyginus: Fabula 82; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 38 and 60; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 603 ff; Lactantius: loc. cit.; Servius on Virgil’s Georgics iii. 7; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 152.

  7. Hyginus: Fabula 83; Tzetzes: loc. cit.; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 406.

  8. Diodorus Siculus: iv. 74; Plato: Cratylis 28; Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead 17; Homer: Odyssey xi. 582–92; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 456; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 60; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 1; Hyginus: Fabula 82.

  9. Pausanias: x. 31. 4; Archilochus, quoted by Plutarch: Political Precepts 6; Euripides: Orestes 7.

 
; 10. Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 36 and 11; Eustathius and Scholiast on Homer’s Odyssey xix. 518; Pausanias: x. 30. 1 and vii. 7. 3.

  11. Pausanias: x. 30. 1; Scholiast on Homer: loc. cit.; Homer: Odyssey xx. 66 ff.; Antoninus Liberalis: Transformations 36.

  12. Homer: Odyssey xix. 518 ff.; Apollodorus: iii. 5.6; Pherecydes: Fragment p. 138, ed. Sturz.

  13. Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid vi. 603; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 26; Hyginus: Fabula 83; Scholiast on Aristides: p. 216, ed. Frommel.

  14. Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 3; Pindar: Olympian Odes i. 37 ff; Lucian: Charidemus 7; Ovid: Metamorphoses vi. 406; Tzetzes: On Lycophron 152; Pausanias: v. 13. 3.

  15. Pindar: loc. cit.; Euripides: Iphigeneia Among the Taurians 387.

  16. Pausanias: iii. 22. 4; Apollodorus: Epitome ii. 2; Ovid: Ibis 517, with scholiast.

  1. According to Strabo (xii. 8.21), Tantalus, Pelops, and Niobe were Phrygians; and he quotes Demetrius of Scepsis, and also Callisthenes (xiv. 5.28), as saying that the family derived their wealth from the mines of Phrygia and Mount Sipylus. Moreover, in Aeschylus’s Niobe (cited by Strabo: xii. 8. 21) the Tantalids are said to have had ‘an altar of Zeus, their paternal god, on Mount Ida’; and Sipylus is located ‘in the Idaean land’. Democles, whom Strabo quoted at second hand, rationalizes the Tantalus myth, saying that his reign was marked by violent earthquakes in Lydia and Ionia, as far as the Troad: entire villages disappeared, Mount Sipylus was overturned, marshes were converted into lakes, and Troy was submerged (Strabo: i. 3. 17). According to Pausanias, also, a city on Mount Sipylus disappeared into a chasm, which subsequently filled with water and became Lake Saloë, or Tantalis. The ruins of the city could be seen on the lake bottom until this was silted up by a mountain stream (Pausanias: vii. 24. 7). Pliny agrees that Tantalis was destroyed by an earthquake (Natural History ii. 93), but records that three successive cities were built on its site before this was finally flooded (Natural History v. 31).